Royal College of GPs and Arras

"Many thanks for all your support and advice Michael, its been much appreciated"

The Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) is a membership body of family doctors committed to delivering excellence in general practice and patient care, in the UK and overseas. Arras People consultant Michael Hides had been called on to  find the right candidate to set up and run the Accreditation Unit for the RCGP’s Practice Accreditation initiative. This is a new post as the initiative is to be rolled out for the first time in 2011.

A New Intiative Requires a Special Project Manager

The aim of Practice Accreditation is to help standardise and drive up quality of services to patients in a way that is supportive to the development of practice teams and helps them to comply with legislative requirements in as streamlined a way as possible. The Unit will be responsible for registering practices; overseeing the assessment process including monitoring and quality assurance; recruitment training and deployment of assessors; appeals process and certificate award; ongoing development and sustainability and acting as Helpdesk for the web based delivery tool.

This post holder will design and set up the system as well as overseeing and running the system. Experience of setting up and delivering systems involving multi-disciplinary working in primary care would be particularly relevant, as would experience in assessment. Good organisational and communication skills will be vital, as will attention to detail and the ability to work with a wide range of people and organisations to deliver high quality work to tight deadlines.

The Solutions Is Ours to Find

The successful candidate was a PRINCE2 accredited Senior Manager with experience of running the regional business support information system and training & development for a regional development body encompassing 300 staff including assessors.  The candidate’s experience included establishing a national accreditation process as well as having undergone accreditation for Investors in People.  The service included providing frontline support for 300 users of a CRM system as well as holding sales roles that were customer relation focused.

None of the candidates' previous roles had included any medical related experience.

The candidate started less than a week after the offer had been made.

The key to Arras People's success in recruiting the right project managers to fit the project and the orgaisation is really understanding the nature of project management. Key word searching of databases just doesn't turn up the right people at the right time -  it is often the nuances or blend of previous experience that makes the ideal candidate fit and that's a very hard thing to find - a bit like a needle in a haystack. Luckily Arras Peope have become well-known for finding that needle when others have failed.